"Swiftness of foot, Keeness of eye"

Padre of the Pigskin Team Chaplain Rev. Ribeiro is Hoya Football's No. 1 Fan
By John Lawless Special to The Hoya Friday, September 23, 2005

The ‘Hoya Football Padre’ is also an associate professor of English. As the football team explodes into the action of a scrimmage play, the joyful voice of Rev. Alvaro Ribeiro, S.J., can be heard across the field. “It’s just like an organized chaos,” Ribeiro, unofficial chaplain to the football team, says in his authoritative but friendly chuckle. Ribeiro has served as the team’s unofficial chaplain throughout his entire career at Georgetown. He has seen just about everything — a change of head coaches, a rise from Division III to the Patriot League in Division I-AA, and more Georgetown football than almost anyone else on campus outside of the actual team.
Though there are those who might regard football with the fervor of religious faith, Ribeiro’s perspective was more one of detached respect when in 1992 he first came to Georgetown. At the time, he did not have his eyes set on being involved with the team. He barely even knew what a first down was, having been born and raised in Hong Kong.
Ribeiro had his first encounter with Georgetown football in one of his first freshman English classes. Marcus Tewksbury (MSB ’96), one of his students and a football player, begged the class to come support Georgetown football at its first home game, complaining of the neglect that the team had suffered in the shadow of Georgetown’s men’s basketball. Not one to leave a prayer unanswered, Ribeiro was only too happy to stop by the team’s practice on the Friday before the game. It was there that he was pounced upon by then-Head Coach Scotty Glacken, who had been searching for 22 years for a Jesuit to act as chaplain to the team. “Without success!” Ribeiro remembers, laughing. When Glacken discovered that Ribeiro was the newest Jesuit on campus, he invited Ribeiro to meet the team the next day. If there was a rapport, he told Ribeiro, he had the job. This was not a job offer, as Ribeiro remembers it — it was an order.
Perhaps Glacken was exploiting the eager rookie, but as Ribeiro says, “I was the freshman Jesuit faculty member.” Exploitation by senior members of the faculty was hardly avoidable.
That was 14 years ago. Now Ribeiro is one of Georgetown football’s biggest supporters. He chats casually with the players as he moves among them on the sidelines during practice, discussing the previous game, sympathizing with the injured and admiring on-target passes.
“It’s been wonderful for me personally,” says the “Football Padre,” as Ribeiro calls himself half-jokingly. “It counterbalances too much intellectualism as a Padre-professor.”
It isn’t surprising that a close relationship has developed between the Padre and the team. Ribeiro says he has taken great pride in the players throughout his tenure, and he is only too happy at games to, as he puts it, “do my little magic of hexing the opposition.”